From UNE laboratory to a life in bird song

February 28, 2008

After 20 years of productive research in Britain and the United States, Dr Patrice Adret has visited the laboratory at the University of New England that set him on his scientific career.

Dr Adret (pictured here), from the University of Chicago, is a neuroscientist who works on vocal learning in songbirds – a field with important implications for medical research on neurological conditions such as speech disorders and epilepsy.

He conducted his postgraduate research in UNE's Physiology Department, completing his PhD thesis in 1988. Late last month his PhD supervisor at UNE, Emeritus Professor Lesley Rogers, and her colleague Professor Gisela Kaplan, welcomed him back to their Centre for Neuroscience and Animal Behaviour at UNE, where, surrounded by current postgraduate students, he relived his postgraduate days.

"I'm very excited to be back at UNE for the first time since completing my postgraduate studies here," Dr Adret said. "The lab feels very familiar – even after 20 years."

Arriving at UNE from his native France in 1985, Patrice Adret found himself (after a few months of self-directed research) under the supervision of Professor Rogers – a world-renowned authority on brain lateralisation in the development and behaviour of the domestic chicken. Working on visual lateralisation in feral chickens, his PhD research flourished at UNE, where he learnt many experimental techniques that he has continued to use throughout his scientific career.

That career continued – after he had completed his PhD studies in 1988 – at St Andrew's University in Scotland where, working with Dr P.J.B. Slater in the study of zebra finches, he made significant contributions to one of the most keenly-pursued research endeavours in comparative neuroscience – an understanding of how birds learn to sing. This is of particular interest to neuroscientists because songbirds learn their songs through processes of vocal copying and auditory feedback analogous to those employed by human infants when learning to speak. A fascinating difference between birds and humans, however, is that neurons controlling those processes in the songbird brain are able to regenerate – after periods of atrophy – with the seasonal onset of singing.

One of Dr Adret's contributions at St Andrew's was the development of a technique for inducing finches to overcome their resistance to learning songs from a tape recorder. He discovered that this could be achieved by allowing the birds to control the tape recorder themselves by pecking an on/off button.

After six years at St Andrew's ("good years" as he remembers them) he moved to the University of Chicago to work with the prominent neuroscientist Dr Daniel Margoliash in his attempt to identify a network of neurons corresponding to the "acquired auditory template" that is thought to guide birds through the process of vocal imitation. Their work continues, and, together with Dr Kurt Hecox, they are exploring the possibility of using the songbird brain (and particularly those neural networks associated with vocal learning) as a model in developing treatments for epilepsy in children.

Another goal is to apply an understanding of neuronal regeneration in songbirds to possible treatments for brain damage in humans – including damage caused by diseases such as Alzheimer's.

During his visit to UNE, Dr Adret presented a lecture on the search for the "song-learning template", prefacing his discussion of auditory memory in songbirds with comments on his own "wonderful memories" of UNE.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at February 28, 2008 05:10 PM